Drector Joseph Kosinski has never shied away from a technical challenge.
His first film, 2010’s “Tron: Legacy,” was on the cutting edge of digital de-aging by having current-day Jeff Bridges confronting the version of himself from 1982’s “Tron.” “Oblivion” (2013) pioneered a technique that would later be adopted by the virtual environments of the sports-media company the Volume. And 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick” placed actors in actual fighter jets for an almost unheard-of degree of realism.
All of that seems like a warm-up to the challenges he faced on “F1,” the racing movie that stars Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes, an over-the-hill driver hired to help rejuvenate a low-rated team. Kosinski had dreamed of making an immersive racing movie for years, but he couldn’t have shot “F1” without first making Maverick, the zeitgeist-capturing $1.49 billion-grossing adventure that was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
“What I learned on ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ was that the audience does appreciate and really responds, I think, viscerally and emotionally, to footage that has been shot for real,” he said. “There is something that you can connect to when it’s done for real, when you know someone’s really going through the experience.”
Kosinski consulted Toto Wolff, the Austrian billionaire and principal of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, who told the filmmaker, “The thing that movies haven’t ever really gotten right is the speed. Because by the time you put movie cameras and batteries and the structure required to hold a camera on a car, you’re slowing it down. So the footage you end up with can be real and captured in the real environment, but the speed is going to be slow, because you’re not going to be able to corner with all that weight.” Wolff’s suggestion: “Start with a race car and modify it to film your movie, rather than the other way around.”
And that’s what they did, with the help of some Formula Two cars, which are slightly lighter and less powerful than their Formula One counterparts. “We bought real F2 cars, shipped them to Mercedes-AMG in England and stretched the wheelbase to closely match an F1 car,” Kosinski said. “Mercedes designed a brand-new body kit that was tested in their wind tunnel to make it look just like a Formula One car.” As the vehicle was being assembled, they found a compartment for “the batteries and receivers and transmitters and recorders,” shoved into its base. The sensor and camera lens were up near where Pitt and costar Damson Idris were driving.
Kosinski wanted the ability to pan the camera, to whip around from the driver to another car or look out across the track. These wound up being some of the most dynamic moments in the movie. But as with everything else “F1”-related, it wasn’t easy. “It took about a year of research and development to get all of this working together,” he said. The first time they tested it, they destroyed a camera and a bunch of lenses to shoot footage that was so shaky it was deemed unusable. Undeterred, they kept testing until right before the Silverstone Grand Prix. “We got it working properly just in time for the first week of shooting.”
While the main cameras were marvels of engineering, built largely by Panavision and Sony, Kosinski and the “F1” team leaned on Apple, which produced the film, for additional rigs. “There’s a little pod behind the driver’s head that holds a broadcast streaming camera,” Kosinski said. “F1 allowed us to take that out and replace it with a camera that Apple developed that recorded onboard 4K ProRes footage during the actual races, and it was derived from an iPhone.” Around 30 shots were filmed on what the director described as a “modified iPhone system.
Getting the feed from the race cars back to mission control was difficult, because they were going 180 miles an hour and moving in and out of the range of the antennae within just a few seconds. The team had to install an antennae array at every track. “The technology required to get that transmission to be consistent for a full lap at all these different tracks, where you’ve got thousands of different frequencies competing for the same airspace, was very complicated,” Kosinski said.
Controlling the cameras within this array “was its own engineering problem,” he added, especially because there was a slight delay. “I’d have to anticipate things before they happen, which I ended up getting pretty good at.”
In post-production, Kosinski’s team had to “reskin” the race cars to change their outward markings, something that he had done previously with a car a decade earlier (“I was shooting a commercial for Ford and the car didn’t exist yet; it was a prototype”) and in “Top Gun: Maverick.”
“We did the next iteration of that,” he said. “All the footage we shot with Brad and Damson, they would be driving with other Apex GP cars (the fictional company from the movie) around them, driven by our other drivers. And we would be able to turn those other cars into a Ferrari or a Mercedes or a Red Bull whenever I needed. Similarly, I could take footage of the race shot outside the track and put the Apex GP car in any position I wanted in that footage. It’s a little magic trick that creates the illusion that Damson and Brad are actually in the race itself.”
With “F1,” even the visual effects are part of the grand design, to make you feel as though you’re really in the cockpit, whirring around at untold speeds, riding the line between life and death, humanity and some technological horizon, fast as hell.
This story first ran in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
